Breaking the Radio Silence

Brent and I have been quiet here at FaradayRF. Our lives have been changing rapidly over the last several months and this has a lot to do with why FaradayRF has taken a back seat. This is not for a lack of interest and we’d like to let you in on some of our adventures so far and what’s ahead for us and the project.

Why Has FaradayRF Been Quiet?

Within the last month both Brent and I left SpaceX. We didn’t leave at the same time but close enough. We have our reasons for leaving and closing the amazing chapter in both our lives that was Space Exploration Technologies and there’s no use in explaining it further. It’s time for a new challenge for both of us. As you can imagine, it was not an easy choice to move on from a company that is changing history, but SpaceX will continue on without us and we will still attempt to help change history at other companies. I cannot believe the experience I’ve obtained in such a short amount of time at SpaceX. If you’re reading this and were a coworker at SpaceX (we know some of you were 🙂 ) then good luck and we’ll be rooting for Crew Dragon when it heads to orbit!

Brent is currently moving up to the Bay Area to join an autonomous airplane startup as one of their first avionics hardware engineers. I am staying in the Los Angeles area and have joined Relativity Space as their first avionics hire. It’s an exciting opportunity to join a startup and get to fundamentally build a rocket avionics system from scratch. I’m excited about the company and challenges ahead as Relativity Space figures out how to reduce the labor necessary to build rockets! Both Brent and I have our work cut out for us but we’re looking forward to this adventure even if it means we need to slow down on FaradayRF.

What’s Next

Over the next couple months we’re going to recollect ourselves and settle into both startups. Over time we plan to integrate FaradayRF back into our schedules better and learn some new skills required to work on this project remotely. However, since it’s been open source and largely on GitHub so far this might not be much of a stretch! Just prior to us leaving SpaceX and slowing down we were on the cusp of releasing a major rewrite of the software and firmware for Faraday. This update allowed the radio to be used as a network adapter on a Linux-based computer. Releasing this software will be our immediate goal as we return to the project. Feel free to reach out to us via email or Twitter.

Licensed radio amateur KB1LQC and Co-Founder of FaradayRF. Professional Electrical Engineer designing and building avionics for rockets and spacecraft during the day and developing the future of digital amateur radio experimentation by night. All opinions are my own.